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I’m just listening to your show and wanted to add to your excellent rant about Darwin. I’m currently studying for a PhD in biology and have never read any of Darwin’s works. Well, I’ve read the first chapter or so of ‘Voyages of the Beagle’ but that’s more a travelogue than a science book. Darwin is HISTORY. I get funny looks from my supervisor when I try and cite papers from more than a couple of decades ago, I’d hate to think what he’d do if I tried to cite stuff from over a century ago!

While it’s important to understand the historical context of any field of science (if only to see what mistakes have been made so you don’t repeat them) the idea that the person matters is a massive fallacy. You’re completely right when you say they see it as a cult of personality (and history of science writers don’t help as they often make it about the ‘maverick’ or ‘genius’, ignoring all those who had to do a lot of relatively boring but completely necessary groundwork to allow those people make their discoveries and become famous).

The funniest thing in the context of Darwin is that even if he did recant (which he didn’t), Wallace came up with the same idea at the same time. If Darwin hadn’t existed we’d still have the theory of evolution by natural selection, it’s just the pejorative term would be ‘wallacism’ rather than darwinism.

tl;dr: we can’t leave gays unprotected, not even in Bumfucker, Mississippi.

There’s a reason we have “protected classes” — it’s our way of saying that society does not condone discrimination, of saying that at least when it’s a business transaction, it’s not OK to screw over other people just because they’re a minority.

Back in the (African-American) civil rights era, a lot of people made the exact same arguments you made about 2/3 of the way through against protective legislation for lgbt* people: that business owners had a right to refuse service, that minorities could expect substandard service, that they ought to find other businesses or start their own, that the market will fix it, etc. In forward-thinking places, that was kind of the case (not entirely; systemic racism is complicated). However, in others, it completely wasn’t; back then, there were huge areas where NOBODY was serving blacks, and that had to end.

So, will adding lgbt* to discrimination laws fix all the discrimination? No, it won’t; to a degree, the hardcore haters are going to hate no matter what we do — Your Homophobic Uncle is probably going to go to the grave hating ‘dem buttsexers. But, it’ll force the haters to make a decent excuse, instead of just saying “fuck you, we don’t serve/house/employ gay/brown/atheist/whatever people around here” and kicking them out of the door. And, if the excuse they give sucks, they can still get sued — “you took the less-qualified [straight] guy for the same wages? Oh, I think I saw what you did there.” Moreover, it’ll discourage “soft” discrimination of the small-town “Well, I’d love to help you, but…” sort, giving “peer pressure” bigots an excuse to not act quite so cuntishly.

It’s social engineering to work toward exterminating a maladaptive social pattern. That’s kind of a big part of what government does. Government doesn’t “solve” murder, so much; it just has laws to make life suck for people who commit murders, in order to make fewer (though not zero) murders happen. Yeah, there’s an argument there about rehabilitative vs punitive justice, but…too much f’n effort. Plus, because most of the charges are civil charges, it IS somewhat market based, in that people can choose whether it’s really worth their time to push a discrimination case forward. Suspiciously slow service for you and your partner? Flip ’em off, two-cent tip, never go back. Big, curly pubes in your food? Sue ’em bloody.

At some point in the near future, this change does need to happen everywhere, because we are all Americans and horribly backwards regions hold us back. If [minority] can’t comfortably live in an area, never mind the civil rights thing, that’s a pool of people that aren’t making things, aren’t buying things, and aren’t paying local taxes. Attention Scrooge McBigot: this is a business environment that’s underperforming, and the gay money you’re running out of town buys just as much hookers and blow as the rest. And, oh yeah, it also buys public works, schools, and police to keep the peasants, er, criminals quiet.

Tom & Cecil,
I thoroughly enjoy your show and have been an avid listener since show #35. You always make me laugh. I was on my way to work listening to this show and I had to pull over because I was laughing so hard: I was crying over Tom’s Science Project story. Hysterical!

I vote not the movie. I want to watch said movie so I can be engaged in the conversation. I still haven’t listened to the last movie review podcast… I’m super interested in the death topic you mentioned.

I never understood why trigonometry is this supposed “difficult” subject. At school level basically all it does is say “in right triangles the proportions between the sizes of the sides depend only on the angles, not on how big the triangle is” (which is rather duh) and then just names some of those proportions (sine is this side divided by that side, cosine is this side over that side etc.), and asks you to use them in some places. Nothing to it at all.

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